Kim Snider Shares Her “Reverse Funnel” Strategy And How to Use it to Launch a Membership Site the Right Way [Episode 18]

In this episode, long time marketing expert and finance veteran, Kim Sinder shares the inside story of how she launched her new membership site, “Sane Crypto” with Memberium for ActiveCampaign.

Sane Crypto is a membership site that teaches baby boomers how to create a sane strategy for investing in cryptocurrencies to save more for retirement. Kim won Infusionsoft’s ‘Most Helpful Partner’ award a few years back and was big in the Infusionsoft space. Before that, she started an Investment firm that was on the Inc 500 list two years in a row

You’d think that someone with all this marketing experience would build an advanced membership site with a pretty complex marketing funnel, right?

She did the exact opposite. Kim marketed and built her membership program strictly following what she refers to as the “reverse funnel concept.”

This means before she even created one piece of content for her membership site, she did a lot of work figuring out who her target market really is, what they wanted and figuring out what messaging they responded best to.

Once she figured out the best “hooks” that her target audience responded best to, she then pre-sold access to her membership program to make sure there would be enough people willing to join her membership site. All before she built or invested her time in creating one piece of content for her membership site.

The way that Kim went about doing all of this is a lot simpler than you think. To find out how she did it, you’ll want to listen to the full episode to discover how…

Over the years, we’ve seen a tons membership owners think they need to have the perfect membership site before they start selling it. This can turn into a project like Noah’s arc. Except once it’s built, no one comes...and no one ends up buying the membership.

This is why we recommend taking a MVP (Minimum Viable Product) approach to creating a membership site, or even better pre-selling your membership like Kim has.

In this episode Kim shares a ton of valuable advice for anyone who’s looking to start a membership site from ground zero or is in the process of starting one.

You’ll also find out Kim’s advice on marketing a membership site in the early stages, how she’s created all of her ‘members-only’ content following a minimum viable strategy, and what’s worked best for her.

To learn more about SANE crypto and Kim you can visit www.sanecrypto.com or check out her podcast, the SANE Crypto Podcast. You can also download her quick start guide or sign up for her webinar every Wednesday through the link above.

Throughout this episode, you’ll also discover...

The importance of targeting the right people for your membership site, how to find them and discovering the right message or “hook” that lures them to join your membership site.

Find out what the reverse funnel concept is and why it’s the best strategy for solopreneurs and anyone who’s looking to start a membership site on their own.

Find out Kim’s minimum viable approach to building her membership site’s content, how she successfully marketed it and much more.

Kim’s advice on what to do, what not to do and when to do it when it comes to first launching a membership site.

Building your marketing funnel for your membership is just like building a house, you start with the foundation first not the roof. Find out Kim’s minimum viable approach to building her membership site’s content, how she successfully marketed it and much more.

Want to learn more about Kim's Reverse Funnel process?Dissover how to create a $100,000 online course by end of 2018 ... without a blog, email list, team, huge ad budget ... (or even a product)!

Kim was kind enough to offer a great deal for all Memberium subscribers on her "Reverse Your Funnel" program.

Until August 17th, 2018 you can get Kim's "Reverse Funnel" program for just $497, which is a full $1,000 off the normal price of the course. On top of that she's including a full money back guarantee, so if for any reason you don't think it's worth it, Kim will give you your money back, no questions asked!

Subscribe and Follow to Get More Tips to Grow Your Membership Site

​Episode Transcript

Micah: Hey everybody it’s Micah Mitchell with the Membership Site Success Show and today we have Kim Snider on the call whom I’m really excited to talk to, I think she’s got some interesting stuff to share! Kim, welcome!

Kim: Thank you so much, Micah, thrilled to be here!

Micah: Cool, Kim runs Sane Crypto, she runs a couple different companies and I want to ask you a little bit about some of your background so people get to know you but then I want to dive into a couple of concepts. You and I talked the other day and I just found so much of what you’re saying so interesting because, one, I’m interested in crypto, but the way you’re building this program that you’re doing, I just thought it was really interesting because you are somebody who has done membership sites before but there is a specific reason why you didn’t do one yet in this case.

We’re going to get into all that but real quick if you don’t mind giving everybody an idea about who you are, maybe some of your background and maybe where you’re at today!

Kim: Sure, I’d be happy to. Gosh! Let me see if I can do this in the Reader’s Digest version. My background is predominantly in investments about almost 20 years ago now, I just hate to say it’s been that long, I started an investment firm which grew out of my experience with Wall Street. Let me even back up further than that, when I came out of college I took a job for a company and they were doing about 36 million a year in sales, I was a part-time clerk in the purchasing department.

Eight years later they’ve grown into a billion a year in sales, I was a senior manager with the firm’s executive. Company went public, I was 29 years old, I didn’t know anything about money. So, not knowing anything and thinking it was the adult thing to do, I turned all of that over to a broker and a firm that unless you’ve lived your entire life under a rock, you know the name of this firm, and in two short years, oh, by the way, I quit my job and proceeded to have a really good time but in this phase of two short years they had managed to lose everything I had.

So, that is actually what set me along the path to figuring out money, the great game of money, and after I finally got myself put back together, which was a long process, I decided that I would be accountable for whatever financial situation I find myself in from that day forward, I will never again put my financial future in the hands of another human being. I started to educate myself on finance and investing. I gradually started to build up a Nestegg, investing my own money.

Along the path I ended up as an options trader at the Chicago Options Exchange, invented an investment method, started an investment firm and, anyway, I did that until 2009, retired, moved to South Carolina here to build my Polo farm and thinking that I was just going to live happily ever after, that was after company number nine, so I started about four, five little lifestyle businesses since then.

Just kind of dabbling, learning. You know, it’s funny, in some ways I feel like I’ve been not realizing, learning what I needed to learn for waiting for crypto to come along. But, what I’ve been learning all this time is funnels, automation, digital marketing, Facebook advertising and all of those things for the last three years and then crypto came along and now I’m back in investments again.

Micah: That’s a good Reader’s Digest version because I’m sure there’s so much there. I came across you first in Infusionsoft space and for those of you who don’t know Kim, she won the Infusionsoft’s Most Helpful Partner award a couple of years back and was really digging the Infusionsoft space so seems like anything you do you do great with it, you know, you’re very successful with it and so I think it’s a privilege to be able to interview you today.
I want to kind of jump in to, I won’t go off on to many crypto tangents but for those people listening who have no idea what that is, do you want to kind of explain what crypto is and a little bit of what you’re doing with SANE Cyrpto and we’ll jump into other aspects of it?

Kim: Sure. Maybe you’ve probably heard of the most famous of the crypto currencies that would be Bitcoin. There are in addition to Bitcoin couple thousand other cryptocurrencies and the way that I like to explain cryptocurrencies is like this: I tell people Internet is to Blockchain as email is to Bitcoin.

What I mean by that just to help you understand it is back in the day, back in the mid 90s, the Internet was this new, fangled thingy that nobody really new what to do with, that a lot of people said was going to change the world and a bunch of other people just said nah, and email was the killer app that, if you’re old enough and remember when A Wall started to mail out snail mail in millions of CDs and that got people using email.

That was the app that really created the widespread mass adoption of the internet. Fast forward today where the internet is a transfer of information, packets of data, instantaneously, globally in a blink of an eye, the Blockchain, which is the underlying technology of all these cryptocurrencies is the instantaneous global transfer of value. It’s the internet of money and Bitcoin is the email of today. It is I believe the application that is going to create that mass adoption but for the moments it’s just really early days, it’s like the internet in 1993. So many people haven’t even heard of it or what they have heard of it is incorrect or slanted or hyped up, all kinds of things.

That’s what it is and in the same way that I really felt the need after having been taken advantage of by Wall Street in that way to help other people, make sure they didn’t get taken advantage of, that’s why I started my investment firm, that’s why I started teaching people my investment method. I’ve done the same thing with crypto because I see the exact same thing happening. I see it as having a really important place in someone’s portfolio but it must be done carefully, strategically, hence the name SANE Crypto.

Micah: Yeah, the name was immediately interesting to me when you brought it up because crypto seems insane and I’ve been following it and investing in it for only a couple months but there’s so many people who say the craziest stuff daily, just total crazy, and it was easy for me to fall into a lot of the negative patterns like the fear of missing out, I had no idea what I was doing. It’s funny because I’m such a perfect candidate for your program because I knew that most of what I was reading couldn0t be accurate because it just sounds crazy and I’ve done internet marketing long enough to be like “that’s a scam”.

But, I love the angle on it, it’s such a perfect angle because most of the stuff is just very out there and it’s hard to sort it through so I’m very excited about your program and I was listening to one of your podcasts with my wife the other day and we were kind of seeing a little bit of hope in before we were just doing it, we didn’t understand it but we kind of maybe intuitively or because the banks and mutual funds and everyone was saying such negative things about it to us then it must be good.

What’s really interesting to me is when we were talking the other day I said “Oh, so you’ve got a program for this, you’re saying crypto program” and, naturally me being very membership site-biased I ask that question and I thought the reason, for those of you listening this is the Membership Site Success Show but I brought Kim on not just because of her background and authority but because she doesn’t have a membership site for very intelligent reason. Let’s kind of jump into your whole reverse funnel concept and if you want to give an overview of that and talk about how it applies to what you’re doing with SANE Crypto.

Kim: Sure. The reverse funnel concept is something that I came up with over the last couple of years both as I tried to build my own, as I said, a couple of different lifestyle businesses that I was dabbling in, and as well as helping others with theirs. And watching the conventional wisdom about how you do that and the conclusion that I reached very rapidly was that it was backward, it was upside down. And, what I mean by that is the conventional wisdom is that you start at the top of the funnel and you start building there and you work your way down.

If I was doing this the conventional way, the way that most people teach you to do, and I wanted to build SANE Crypto, than what I would do is I would start out with probably an idea with what it was that I was going to sell, who I was going to sell it to, I would build out my product, then I would start creating a bunch of content, I would run Facebook ads so the Facebook ads take you to the content and then from there I would drive you to a lead magnet, come to lead magnet, maybe to the tripwire, you all know the drill, then the conversion event which would be the webinar and then finally, after all this stuff, someone actually pays me some money.

The problem with that is first of all every single one of these is a point to failure, the second problem in my book is I’m a solopreneur. So, to build out all this stuff takes a lot of time that I don’t have as a solopreneur. Then I get it all built out and only then do I find out if somebody actually wants to buy one of these that I’m selling. And for me that’s a problem. The other problem is the changes that I make at the top of the funnel, where most people focus, the impact by the time it gets all the way to the bottom are massively diluted.

The way I do this business building is I start at the bottom and I work my way up.

For me, I believe in minimum viable anything. I never build anything until I absolutely positively have to and only because it’s the thing that will, I’m a big advocate by the way of the book The ONE Thing by Gary Keller, if you haven’t read it I strongly recommend it, the clarifying question of one thing, what’s the one thing that if I did it right now it would make everything else easier or unnecessary, that’s all about leverage. Solopreneurs, we have to bring maximum leverage to bear because that’s all we have, that’s all we have.

So what I do, I never build a product first. If you saw some of my products compared to what’s out there you’d think “nobody would buy it” but you would be wrong because what I do is I start out by figuring out who am I selling to, what’s the problem that they have, there’s enough of them, there’s a critical mass, they will pay me a reasonable amount of money to solve for them, that I can solve, that I want to solve, that I would enjoy working with this group of people and then, once I have that as an idea, I start working on hooks.

That’s my first step. I got to find a hook that will create a ton of energy in that group of people around this idea, around this problem. And, until I have a hook anything else I do can’t possibly work or can’t possibly work well. I would argue with you that if your funnel isn’t working nine times out of ten, 99 times out of 100 it’s probably that you don’t have a hook. At least you don’t have a hook that works to the group that you’re trying to sell to. For example, the easiest way to think of a hook is just, Frank Kern calls it “Yay without boom”.

The hook for SANE Crypto for example is how a little bit of Bitcoin can make your retirement portfolio go a long way. That’s the hook. Now I’ve been through 40 hooks probably since Thanksgiving because I run constantly tests trying to find the best one but that’s the one I’m on right now and to your point about why SANE Crypto, the yay is make my retirement portfolio, which for my audience of 55 year old engineers is really important, make your retirement portfolio go a long way is the yay and the little bit of Bitcoin right away saying were not going to invest tons of money, that’s the boom, not a lot of boom.

Anyway, that’s how we do it. That’s the overview of the reverse funnel and then you work your way backward up that chain, then to the webinar and then as you need to, and for us solopreneurs content is going to be last. For me, it’s never the first thing. It’s the last thing because it’s not generally the thing that’s going to bring the most leverage. So why do I not have a membership site? Because right now my course is just minimum viable course. If you saw it, in fact, it’s really just a protected, barely, Youtube playlist with 40 videos. Nothing else, really, besides a meeting.

If you get the right hook and you get an audience and you get a problem that people are desperately trying to solve and you solve it for them, they don’t care if you deliver that solution in a leaking tin can. They don’t, right? And then later as you start to create, you know there’s some stability to what you’re doing, you’ve figured out all the things that you’re going to change and the things that work and don’t work, somewhere down there then comes a membership site but I’m just not there yet. Does that make sense?

Micah: It totally makes sense and I appreciate you sharing all that, it’s perfect! I’ve said it maybe once or twice on this podcasts on previous episodes, I shared this story but just to reiterate, I did the opposite at one point. I made all this content, I made a great membership site and I went to sell it and it was in a market where they had a need, the product was great, I was good at membership sites, I was good at the subject matter and nobody bought it.

And I’m glad that you brought up the hook because I was desperate, nobody was buying my thing that I put all of my effort into and I had to get this thing to work because I had put all my eggs in this one basket.Then a friend basically recommended Gary Bencivenga’s stuff to me about hooks, exactly the hooks, and I changed the hook on my sales page and the whole thing totally changed. We did over 100k in sales on this offer because of a hook, because of the headline. I didn’t change the membership site, I didn’t change the content, I didn’t change the sales page,

I didn’t change the price so I love that you brought that up and I think to your point about starting at the bottom of the funnel it really is, most people do have it upside down and I would guess most people listening to this podcast right now have this upside down because they do listen to everyone else who says “oh go start developing content, go test this and that out and the lead magnet.”

And just like you said, the whole thing is backward and also to your point, what you’re saying Crypto program is not a membership site it’s just this other stuff, yeah, I don’t care if it’s the crappiest quality Youtube video if it’s got the information I need to solve my problem, which is to stop being insane with the crypto and being emotionally driven, I don’t care how it’s delivered so you’re 100% right so my story definitely seconds that and many more stories show briefly, I had a client who built a very large membership site and the whole time they were saying “Well, we can’t launch yet because we have to have these other features because when we do launch people are going to love it so much, we don’t want them to get a bad taste in their mouth, we want them to think it’s the very best so they’ll tell their friends and all that.”

Long story shorts, they didn’t sell anything ever because they found out the basic premise of the whole thing was wrong and wasn’t going to sell and your method would have found that out for them almost immediately so follow up question to you, if you’re not doing that other marketing stuff that most people are trained to do, how did you get your first couple sales or what did you do to sell people into the program initially?

Kim: Sure, so I do a couple of things and it depends on if you already have a list at all or you’re starting from absolute scratch. In a perfect world, you have some people who you think are a target for what it is you’re going to be selling because that’s how you’ve come up with this problem that needs solving. Find a need and fill it, kind of the idea. And that makes it a lot easier of course because then you take your ideas and you try them to that existing list. But, assuming that you don’t have that, which is very often the case, for me the process of finding the hook also starts to find me those first customers.

For me the easiest way for you to find a hook is to do a Facebook live every single day for as long as it takes. Not really worrying about the content at all or even if anybody shows up. What you’re trying to do is you’re just testing headlines. Facebook gives you preferential treatment, they give you preferential reach with Facebook lives and for a dollar a day you can either boost them to an audience that you think this should resonate with and I always like to say the Supreme Court Justice, I forgot his name, but he said about pornography, I can’t define it but I know it when I see it.

Your hook is the same. So you’re hook is a statement of the problem or the promise in a way it creates an energetic response in your target audience, in the person who has that need. That energetic response, people say what does that mean, you’ll know it when you see it. You can almost feel it coming through the computer like that was it, they got it, that hooked them. And so that’s what you’re looking for and when you find it those people will come, they will become your first list. And then you gradually start to work backward from that. Then you say “Alright, that worked, do you guys want to come to a webinar?” and it starts from there.

Which is also, by the way, backward because after you get a hook the next most leverage thing is a webinar so I go straight backward that way, I run Facebook ads straight to a webinar and once I have that hook I can bring people into my webinar at a reasonable cost all day long because I figured all that foundational stuff first and then gradually worked backward from there.

Micah: I got you and I appreciate that you started from ground zero. If you don’t have anything, here’s how to start. For people who do let’s say have a list, that is I think a lot of membership site owners they know they want to make this membership site because they’re already serving this market in some way, right? So let’s say they have for example an email list, how do you test a hook on an email list? Okay, so different subject lines and see which one gets traction?

Kim: Totally, because again, when you find it, it will work. What you’ll notice is that your open rate will be two or three times what it normally is. It’s super simple.

Micah: And those emails, are those going to some content, is it a webinar invite, what would you suggest?

Kim: It depends on where you are in your business, I think to some extent I started out by saying in an ideal world you’ll have a list, a reflection, maybe that’s not the ideal world, in some ways I think that may back you into trying to solve a problem, a hammer with a screw kind of thing because you have an audience you think you know them and that’s the biggest mistake, is to think and to assume you know anything about them and what will work, the product, in some ways it may not really be the blessing that I made it out to be but if you have that it’s going to depend. You’re going to have to modify somewhat depending on your circumstances, for example, is it a list of 20 people or is it a list of 20 000 people. Obviously, I can do a lot more things with that 20 000 people than with that 20, I’m going to burn that 20 out really fast.

So, I would probably, here’s the colonial rule, you never ever ever build anything that you haven’t already proven that you can sell. So, if I only had 20 what I would probably be doing is I would not be going to them first, I’d be going to Facebook live first, testing my hook until I thought I had it. And then what I would be doing is then I would put on my list and Facebook simultaneously with that hook as my webinar title and see if I can get people in my webinar. Once I got people in my webinar then what I’m going to do is I’m going to see if I can sell them a pre-sale of my program that I think that they want to buy.

Because, again, even if I can get them in my webinar with the hook, there’s no guarantee that what I think I’m about to build is the thing that they’ll pay for and at the price I think they will pay for it. So, until you can pre-sell it, look, even if you do a webinar and you drive a bunch of people to it and only one person buys it you can always say to that person I’m sorry we didn’t have enough interest, and you go back to your drawing board and you refund them their money. There’s lots of ways to do it but you keep going until you got the thing that they will buy at the price you need them to buy it at before you ever build it. That’s how you would back into it.

Micah: Yeah love it. And I think you’re right also when you say having a list might not be ideal, I think not only for the reasons you mentioned but some people feel like they have something to lose, somebody might say “What if I do all these Facebook lives and nobody shows up and then people think I such because no one is showing up to my Facebook lives”, what would you say to that person?

Kim: Well, I don’t care whether they actually show up at my Facebook live at all. That’s not what I’m interested in because unless you are some sort of a celebrity people aren’t going to show up. You will be talking to dead air, you really don’t care even about the content. When I do them, I’m talking off of an outline, I spend all of my time prepping for the hook and about three minutes for whatever I’m going to say because that’s not really what I care about. I care about can I get people to come and watch and most of those people is because you’re going to, it’s going to be a replay and it’s going to be after the fact. Do you want to care what people think about you or do you want a successful business?

That’s just not the equation. For me it’s how do I find, I am on a treasure hunt for that hook. And if I may Micah just kind of go back to something that you said, thinking again back to the list, the problem with the list is the mistake that I see the mistake people make time and time again and I know you see this to, is that they start with an audience which is way too broad. So they’re really not solving anything for anybody or they’re trying to be all thanks to all people. My audience for SANE Crypto is very, very specific, it is a 55 year old engineer who lives in Dallas, Texas, who has a certain amount of investable assets, who is just on the bubble and I go right at that person.

If my LinkedIn ad doesn’t have engineer in the title then he doesn’t see that ad. If you don’t niche way down into your audience then you’re really never going to get that energetic response since you’ll never probably ever be able to speak directly to that problem in a way that resonates as well. And, you’ll much rather have a small group obviously that buys from you than a large group that doesn’t.

The odds of your list being that specific are pretty slim. They’re probably a little bit of this, a little bit of that, people you’ve picked up along the way. That’s what makes me think you’re probably better off starting from scratch. And then, what I did with SANE Crypto, later once I had all of this stuff worked out and I was ready to go with my program, then and only then did I send an email out to my old list and say “I know this is clearly and totally unrelated but if you happen to have any interest in cryptocurrency, come join this list” sort of thing.

Micah: Got you and it’s funny because I think you and I feel the same way about this where we are more interested in the end result than looking good or people thinking poorly of us or whatever. I can say that probably more toward the beginning of my career I would have been more sensitive to it but I’ve been around enough that it’s like people are going to say whatever they’re going to say, you can’t really control it, and without that hook and without really solving the specific need for the specific avatar or at least digging down, if I tried to please the whole list after some of the stuff over the years and how kind of mixed the list is, I’m not going to get close enough to anyone in person to really get them to want to buy.

So, let’s talk for a minute, you said minimum viable everything. So, can you walk through, using SANE Crypto as an example, when you started with these Facebook lives, what are a couple of the steps, what are couple of your next steps? If somebody wants to follow this what can they specifically do? Let’s say they follow that advice and they run Facebook lives until they figure out “Okay I’ve got the hook, I know it because that response is huge, what’s my next step?”

Kim: So, just one comment about that is you probably don’t have your hook even when you think you do so never stop looking for that hook. That is a constant process of iteration because one, things change, two, it can always be better and the impact, so going back to the reverse funnel thing again, if I can make the 1% improvement in the conversion rate from at the purchase as compared to the 1% of my conversion rate on my lead magnet, the money that drops out of that is massive. It’s like 13x the profit as opposed to if I focus up here on the top.

So understand that when you know the financial leverage that the bottom conversion rate has, of course you’re always going to be looking for that leverage in order to get that and that leverage to me is that hook is tightening that thing more and more and more and if you can find a better one, keep looking. So, it’s a constant process. But the other thing I would say in terms of minimal viable, kind of the way I explain it or think of it is like a Spirograph.

You guys remember that toy way back in the day that had the holes and you go around in the circle and it makes the picture, it was the ring inside and you went around the ring? Well, minimum viable everything is sort of like the Spirograph with three rings and so you’re going around making the one and that one is making a picture and the other one is making a picture and so, all of these things, you start at the bottom and every time you come around the circle you make it a little bit better or you try something more.

Gradually, you’ll get to the top of the funnel and you’ll be doing minimal viable content at the point that you have a really great hook because you’ve been around that circle 100 times already. Is the analogy making sense?

Micah: Yeah!

Kim: So, it’s just a constant process of iteration as I circle around. So, I would say you’re never done with any of these, that’s the nature of minimum viable, it’s just an iterative process of constantly making it better as the need arises or as the opportunity dictates but not before. So, I’m not sure if that’s as specific as you wanted it to be, if you want ask more specific stuff, try to do that.

Micah: Yeah, no, you’re good and I’m glad you addressed that because it’s not like “Hey, you’ve found your hook, move on” but you’re saying you’re continuously searching for your hook so let’s call that maybe the bottom layer where you’re just making it better every single time. I’ll point out kind of a dumb example, so I’ve been doing these podcasts for a little while and then it was like “oh, I’ll get better audio, now I’m going to turn on the video, now I’m going to get better lighting,” you know, and so the first podcast is not going to be as good but just because finally it’s like “oh I got one that is better than the first one and people liked,” I’m still trying to improve it.

Even with this one, eliminating background noise, playing with lights, I figured out I need to fasten this up a little bit, it’s done a little things. But let’s say that, okay, you’ve got the base line, you’re continuously refining that, what I’m looking for is what are some of the next steps? I think if I heard you correctly, these Facebook lives, you’re recording those to use as some of the future content, is that correct?

Kim: No, because at this point they are not cohesive or clean, they’re not even minimum enough that I would publish them for future use. When I’m first starting out Facebook lives, I literally only care about the headline and to find the number of people who view. I can make a custom audience out of it, I can later use the custom audience to target them because I know they watched, they were interested in the hook, right? So, when I get ready, I’m creating a custom audience, I didn’t really elaborate that at the time so as I start to get people watching my videos now I’m ready to start a webinar with that hook as a title, guess who I’m going to target?

I’m going to target all of those people that I’ve created the custom audience from in Facebook who watch my videos, they already know me. So, that’s how I start to create my list, it’s not any mail list actually, it’s a Facebook audience list. For me, what I’m going to do is, once I feel like I have the hook, then I’m going to start working on the content. By content I don’t mean blog posts and things, I really mean my pitch, I really mean what’s the webinar, how I’m going to sell this thing because the thing that you’re after is to get people to pay you. So, after I have my hook, the next thing is how do I get people to pay me.

I can do that in one or two ways, it really depends on you. One, because I’m doing the Facebook lives anyway, I can start to try to work out the pieces of my pitch, and I say pitch, you know what I mean, it’s like how do I talk about this problem and the promise is what I’m saying, in a way that really resonates with my audience. So you can either start doing that, start either paying attention now, not just to the hook but to the content of your Facebook lives until you feel comfortable that you are starting to get somewhere.

I sort of feel like that’s not the best leverage and what I typically do is at that point that I feel like I got a decent hook I’ll keep going down that path with the Facebook lives but now I will start going straight to the webinar. At that point I will put together my first crack at a minimum viable webinar knowing it’s not going to be great, it never is. You just got to over this idea of one and done because it’s just arrogant to think that you can possibly get it right the first time. If you do it’s just a stroke of luck or you’re just settling because it could be so much better so for me I know I’m going to redo that webinar 50 times, which is why I do a webinar once a week.

If you look at SANE Crypto every Wednesday night at 8pm for months now, I’ve been doing a webinar and the reason I do that is it helps me refine my hook, it helps me refine my messaging, it helps me figure out what people feel, what people respond to, what they’re falling asleep to, I will never get that if I put together one webinar and then automate it. I will never get that and so I keep going with the webinars. And so that would be my next step, is to just say “Alright, let’s put together a webinar and see how it goes.” So now I got two Spirograph wheels going, I got the Facebook lives and I got the webinar going.

And then gradually what’s going to happen is you’re finally going to find the right answer that gets people to buy whatever it is that you’re selling. And then you’ve got to deliver, because you haven’t built it yet, each time you’re saying this is what it’s going to be, okay now I’ve sold it so I’ve got these people and you tell them right up front what they’re getting, they’re the guinea pigs of course, and if they’re going to get a discount or access for whatever for being that, and now you start building a minimum viable course.

So, now you got the three Spirograph rings going and maybe that’s just some videos initially, maybe it’s a live course the first couple of times you do it and then chop off later into videos, or however you want to get to it that’s your minimum viable course. So that’s how it goes and then later it’s going to become other things, that’s how I do it.

Micah: That makes sense and just to be really clear, the webinars that you’re talking about, those are not members only, those are the sales webinars where you’re building content, trying to sell the program. What I love about this too is by the time you’ve figured out a hook through Facebook live, by the time you got those people to attend a webinar, stay through it and buy from a pitch you do have a specific people, you do know a lot about them and their problem and how they want it solved so when you make your course it directly addresses that.

And I even recently have been, you know, I’ve made the course because it’s like I think I know a lot about this and I’m going to make the course first and I think probably parts of it resonate with people but it’s not near as specific so yeah, the next anything I do membership-wise is a much better process to follow because casting that wide net you have different pieces that are going to fit different people in a way that can be good but I’m just thinking through this and it’s like yeah, I know a lot of membership site owners because I talk with them all the time, who are just guessing at stuff.

They’re doing exactly what I did and exactly what most people do, assuming rather than actually figuring out as they go. And your model is not spending a lot of time and energy to figure that out, I mean a lot of time initially but it goes a long way in the end.

Kim: That’s right. Again, it’s all about the leverage and all about getting the answers that your potential customers give you either explicitly or implicitly as you’re going along guide to the ultimate outcome or ultimate product.

Micah: That’s amazing and I love that we’re going kind of deep into some of these simple steps, it’s not like here’s the 21 step outline, look one Spirograph, then two and then three and I know just for time sake what I want to do is have you give us an example of, you’ve mentioned your one hook for SANE Crypto about helping people with their retirement portfolios, little bit of Bitcoin can go a long way, do you want to talk to people who are interested because I’m sure a lot of people have heard about it and are interested in crypto so just kind of tell them about your product and also, if you don’t mind, a little behind the scenes of why you think some of these hooks works. So, what I’m saying really is feel free to pitch and talk about why this works and also what the program is and what people can expect and how to find you and join.

Kim: Sure. Well, thank you for that, I really appreciate it. Let me see how to tackle that. I mentioned to you that I have a very specific avatar. And that avatar, and this speaks to everything we’ve been talking about before, what I didn’t say about my previous background is that my investment firm that I’ve built previously, it was a pretty big list, we were on Link List two years in a row, it grew into something pretty big by accident. When I look back now at what I built then, I realize that just by a streak of luck this is actually how I built that previous firm. I started out literally just teaching some friends who said they were going to put their bonus in these .com stocks and I was like don’t do that and they were like what do we do, what do you do…

So I ended up teaching friends and those friends told their friends, their friends told their parents. This method is also a big deal that I invented, I hate to say that but nothing like it existed, it’s crazy that I invented it, I don’t know how I did but I did and it took me years of these path to finally figure it out that the person it was best suited for was actually this near retiree who had just enough money to retire but they were right on that bubble where the one way or another, if things just broke the wrong way they could end up being 90 years old under a bridge eating cat food kind of thing, even though they’ve done all the right things and they’ve accumulated a lot of money.

That was my person. It wasn’t that the method that I had created didn’t work for a thirty year old, which is who I started telling it to, my friends, but it resonated in a really meaningful, deep place for that 55 year old person, that very specific engineer who is a do-it-yourself, who was a tinkerer, who could look at what I had done. So years, and I wasn’t looking for it, I stumbled on it, so probably 5 or 6 years in that company, even though we were growing like a hockey stick, before I found it and I was smart enough to go “Oh my Gosh, these are my people.”

I bring that around to SANE Crypto and also the reverse funnel, this idea of the reverse funnel is really just saying “how can we systemize that process?” It makes so much sense that one, you don’t stop looking, and two, when you really find it that’s when you get the hockey stick growth curve and you know it when you see it but you can’t stop even a year in or assume that you’ve got it. Does that makes sense? Anyway, that was a long way of saying that when I came back to the investment world and SANE Crypto and I looked at it my brain just goes to that place, those are my people, I’ve spent 20 years helping them and thinking about their issues.

So the very first thing that I thought of when I saw cryptocurrency, those same people should be in it. That is my audience because I think this is a way to solve that problem for them. Every investment, every asset in your portfolio has a job to do, a very specific job in the same way your headline and your ad has a job that is different from the image in the ad, it has a job, pieces of your portfolio and cryptocurrency does as well. So, I think I talked all the way around your problem or your question but that’s predominantly who I am marketing this program for but it doesn’t mean it’s the only person that it’s a fit for. I probably just talked all the way around that answer.

Micah: No, you’re good, I’m glad actually that you went to the specifics because you really know whom it resonates most with and even though some other people might buy it, you know who it’s really most targeted at. So for people who are listening to this and who want to come check it out, and I’m not near retirement nor I want to be but I still very much resonate with just the basics of the message, like I said, SANE Crypto is so opposite from everything else you find if you go read about it, it’s all just madness. I think it’s really well positioned and for people who want to find out more about it or start following you or whatever, what can they do?

Kim: I would love that. The first thing they can do is go to SANEcrypto.com and if you’re a podcast listener, I have a podcast, The SANE Crypto Podcast, if you’re listening to this I’m guessing that you probably are. That’s probably the best way to get indoctrinated into my way of thinking about not just crypto but also investing. You really can’t be in my world without getting my world view on investing because even though a lot of people think about cryptocurrencies and investing as being something totally separate to me it’s not, it’s just an asset class, it’s a new asset class, a really exciting one with some really interesting potential.

One that these same rules apply to, you just have to figure it out. I’m always talking about investing broadly and investing cryptocurrencies specifically and so I’d say that’s the easiest way to get into my world. The other way to do it, of course, would be to either download the quick start guide or to sign up for that Wednesday webinar which is every Wednesday at eight o’clock.

Micah: Perfect, I appreciate you sharing that. I know you’ve got a background of doing this in a logical way and for those of you, I’m guessing most people and the people I talk to are like it’s not a great reliable source of what to do with that stuff so if you’re looking for somebody reliable who actually has good fundamentals behind a good opportunity, I recommend you go check out SANE Crypto and also just kind of following Kim and seeing how she’s doing what she’s doing and she talked us through it on this podcast, that would be a great learning experience and I’m excited for when you do a membership site to see how you implement it, what you do and what you leave out because I’m sure there will be a reason for that. I’ll be following that and everybody again go to sanecrypto.com, check out her podcast, her webinar, the quick start guide, it’s all good stuff. Kim thank you so much for sharing!

Kim: Thank you so much for having me, Micah, this was a blast, I really enjoyed it!